Locked and loaded

Well things are as prepared and ready to go for racing tomorrow as they can be when the race is located 20km away over an stretch of open water.

Today has been a solidy busy day, with a bit of easy training this morning followed by a bunch of packing and an afternoon on Rottnest Island getting the bike ready and setting up my gear. Having been over and spent time on the Island, I am very glad that I chose to head over today. It made me realise that doing it all on race morning as I had originally intended probably wouldn't have worked. But now I am reasonably confident that baring incident, the morning should go smoothly. Almost everything is set up and ready to go, all I have to do in the morning is get to Rottnest, collect my bike from a friend and ride it down to transition. Simple (hopefully).

It certainly would have made tomorrow easier to have tonight on Rottnest too, but there is something to be said for the simplicity and comfort of sleeping in your own bed the night before a race. In fact this is only the second time I would have slept in my own bed before a long course triathlon. What a novelty. It shows too since this is definitely the most relaxed I have felt the night before a race in a long time. It sure is nice racing at home now and then.

The other thing that makes tonight relaxing is the knowledge that I don't have to be up at 3:30am or anything similarly ridiculous. Even having to get across to Rottnest tomorrow morning I will still be sleeping in later than I usually would. Nice.

Keen to see what tomorrow will bring. Being over on Rottnest today reminded me of a few things about the Island. Firstly, it is primarily a tourist resort. The majority of people there are tourists and families, not triathletes. Most of these people get around the Island by bike (there are no cars allowed). Tomorrow the roads won't be closed to normal bike traffic and from what I saw today there could be a lot of it. Could make for an interesting type of traffic hazard in the race. That and snakes on the road. Big, poisonous snakes. Avoid them I think.

Being on the Island today reminded me how warm it can be, being a limestone island, lots of Rottnest is quite open, not a lot of shade. Still tomorrow should be cooler than today. Unfortunately part of the reason it will be cooler is because it will be much windier. The fact that Rottnest can be windy is not surprising, I was fully aware of that. The fact that it will be quite windy tomorrow is just part of racing there. What it brings to the day we shall have to wait and see. 

We shall also have to wait and see what my day contains. Daryl and I are going into tomorrow with a very specific race plan. I am also using the race to try out a couple of new things. Both of these goals mean that tomorrow the focus will be on execution. Training has been going really well recently and so I am hopeful of a good day out, but if I can execute the race according to plan then I will be happy no matter what the result.